Domestic livestock, particularly cattle, are often in need of nutrients to assure proper body weight gain and growth to say nothing of general overall health of the animal. It is therefore common to dose the livestock with key nutrients required in hospitalized animals in immunity development. One of the problems in such dosing is that it is difficult to know whether the animal is getting a correct dosage. One of the reasons for this is lack of any control, if choice feeding of medicament is involved. It is therefore more common practice to avoid choice feeding and to directly dose the animals. However, even in direct dosage, the assurance that the animal in fact gets its proper dose of medicament, as opposed to it running out of the animal's mouth, or the animal spitting the medicament out, is not at all a predictable thing. There is, therefore, a need for the development of dose delivery systems which assures that an animal will get a correct dosage of product.
While oral administration is no doubt the best way to assure correct dosage, it too has its problems. One of the problems is that the animal must not only be dosed, but it must be dosed in a safe and effective manner. Perhaps the most efficient way of assuring that the animal is correctly dosed is to administer directly into the animal's esophagus. Administration directly to the esophagus assures that the animal will not spit out the dosage and that the material will be safely delivered into the animal's digestive system.
While product administration directly to the esophagus has obvious advantages, there are also some disadvantages. First, there is no currently available equipment in the industry to deliver product directly into the animal's esophagus safely. Secondly, delivery directly to the esophagus, while it enhances the availability of product to the animal and assures correct dosage, runs the risk of damage to the throat of the animal. There is, therefore, a continuing need for equipment which will allow delivery of treatment materials directly into the esophagus of domesticated livestock in a safe and effective manner.
This invention has this primary objective of fulfilling the above need.